Yesterday, Spectator sat down with University President Lee Bollinger. Highlights from the interview:

• Nearly eight months after Claude Steele’s resignation, Bollinger is very close to announcing a new provost. Interim Provost John Coatsworth told Spectator yesterday that he is “having a great time” as provost and would love to keep the job, and that he believes he is still being considered for it.

• Bollinger said he would “love to see a major emphasis on trying to both rethink the Global Core and the Core itself in relation to globalization.” He explained that,

“A well-educated young person must be aware of what is happening in the world around you, and it has to be approached from the standpoint of moral questions, from the standpoint of economic systems, of legal institutions and policies, of literatures, understanding different peoples, religion. I mean, it’s immense, and every part of the Core, which is about all of these subjects, should be more and more global … In an ideal world, everybody who teaches in the Core might spend a year visiting the global centers and using the global centers as a base for expanding their knowledge of global activity.”

• Columbia has raised about $23 million for its global centers, mostly in gifts that Bollinger believes the University would not have received otherwise. He wants the global centers to be funded entirely by gifts, enabling them to be “close to revenue neutral” for Columbia.

• The School of the Arts is “significantly behind” in its funding for financial aid. Fixing this problem is especially important, Bollinger said, because “students who graduate from the art school don’t get lucrative jobs on Wall Street.”

• The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is currently trying to develop unused land on its grounds— land that, until 2009, Columbia had the legal option to develop. Columbia withdrew from its financial agreement with St. John the Divine in 2009, and at the time, University officials declined to comment on why they had decided to give up the land. But yesterday, Bollinger explained his thinking, saying that expanding to Manhattanville was his priority:

“My feeling was and is that with the restrictions that were part of the original deal, that we could only use it for very limited purposes, and that that was not worth it. And since we don’t have the money to do those things, and we have Manhattanville as the space for the University to grow for the next several decades, it was not, in the financial circumstances we were under, not worth continuing to pay the option value of that space.”

• Bollinger also explained why he has made Manhattanville a top priority:

“Columbia has to be able to grow, that’s been one of my central themes from the start. Unless your university is growing, in terms of physical expansion, you will not thrive in the competition of academic higher education. And we just couldn’t do it because we had no space, and Manhattanville is that opportunity.”

• Fourteen months after the building officially opened, Bollinger is “still working on” finding a donor who wants the Northwest Corner Building to be named after him or her.